29 January 2008

Marina Tsvetaeva

Joseph Brodsky's essay "Footnote to a Poem" discusses Marina Tsvetaeva's elegy for Rilke. This fine essay and others on Akmatova, Auden, and Montale, appear in Joseph Brodsky's Less Than One: Selected Essays, 1986.

The poem's been translated, but I don't have and haven't read a translation except for the short bits in Brodsky's essay. The poem is unbelievable in the original. No, I don't read Russian. I copied the poem's Russian text from this Web link and cannot attest to its accuracy. Try reading it aloud -- zlachnom -- / (Zlachnom -- zhvachnom) meste zychnom, meste zvuchnom -- do you need to know what that means?